V.2 #4 Recommended Practices - An Experienced Teacher’s Warning: Don’t Forget the Prerequisite Skill
Recently I found myself in a local elementary school assisting a new first grade teacher who was stymied at some of his students’ failure to learn the sight words he had been diligently drilling them on for several months. Mr. Noel was concerned that several students were not making progress with instruction in high frequency sight word recognition. He reported the students with the most difficulty did poorly on quarterly literacy benchmark assessments; all demonstrated diffi
V.2 #4 Social Development - Home-School Connections
Although school personnel recognize that children with Learning Disabilities (LD) have difficulty with a variety of academic skills, frequently the relationship between LD and social-emotional skills go unacknowledged in the school setting. Teachers are often viewed as the experts in the child’s academic concerns and the parents the experts of the child’s social-emotional life. As a result, teachers and parents may develop stereotypical ideas of the role that the other plays
V.2 #4 Early Intervention - Autism Spectrum Disorder and Early Intervention: A Summary of Approaches
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) refers to a group of developmental disabilities whose most common characteristics include impaired verbal and non verbal communication, social skills, and restrictive, repetitive, or stereotyped patterns of behavior (See, for example www.autismspeaks.org). The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates the prevalence rate for children to be about 1 in 150 and estimates that 35,111 children between the ages of 3 to 5 were served under th
V.2 #4 Reading - How Does Choice Lead To Student Motivation and Success?
Throughout my school years, teachers often required me to make dioramas related to the books I’d read. Though I was a skillful reader and knew those books well, this type of assignment always raised my level of anxiety because: shoeboxes and other necessary supplies were at a premium in our house; my visual and spatial challenges often caused the characters’ sizes to be disproportionate to the setting; the illustrated parts of the story were those that were easiest for me to
V.2 #4 Mathematics - Three Methods for Teaching Multiplication Facts to Students with Learning Disab
Students with Learning Disabilities (LD) often encounter considerable difficulties in their effort to learn the multiplication facts (or arithmetic combinations of multiplication). Researchers and practitioners have devised and implemented several methods for teaching these facts to students with LD. In the remainder of this column I will describe briefly three such methods, and their instructional implications. The first method is the MASTER (MAthematics Strategy Training fo